Gunter Grass - The Flounder

For the first time during a persistently contentious pregnancy we were worried about the baby. I palpated. I listened. But there was nothing wrong. She'd only turned her left ankle. In three shakes we were fighting again. ("You and your shitty snails!" "You and your shitty leaps!") Ilsebill had to lean on me, which she doesn't like to do. Step by step, I limped her home.

When we got there, I was still worried. I made vinegar compresses, listened again, palpated some more. The child in her womb—"My son!" as Ilsebill said — made knocking movements. "It could have been worse. What if a stone had been lying there. Or some other hard and pointed object. Besides, you're wrong when you attribute the achievements of the Chinese to Great Leaps. Look how they've bloodied their noses with their endless Cultural Revolution. These things can't be done in a hurry. Think of Amanda Woyke. It took years and years for potatoes to take the place of millet. And even longer to abolish serfdom. Always relapses. After Robespierre Napoleon, then Metternich…"

After that I told my Ilsebill — as she lay*there at my mercy — about the developments at the Tribunal. To cheer her up, I mimicked the Flounder's arrogantly curled lip when Amanda's Utopia, the world-wide farm kitchen, was being discussed. I ridiculed his trick of affecting benevolent understanding for everything, even the sheerest nonsense. Then I parodied his manner of speaking: " 'But my dear and gracious ladies! Of course I was glad my contention that the Rumford-Woyke world food center points the way to an egalitarian solution of the food problem has found supporters in your midst, but these things can't be done helter-skelter. It will first be necessary to set up working groups that will-thoroughly and knowledgeably-research the basic foodstuffs of the past and present. A number of questions arise. What role was played in times of famine by the manna

grits obtained from wild grasses? Or: what position shall we take on the protein shortage and hence on the soybean problem? Or: is the European millet shortage before the introduction of the potato comparable to the rice shortage in China before the onset of the Mao Tse-tung era? But if you wish to approach the Chinese world food solution on the basis of the Central European experience, then I must beg you to lose no time in advancing from theory to practice, in other words, to revive Amanda Woyke's West Prussian soup. To the best of my knowledge, Associate Judge Therese Osslieb operates a successful restaurant. Couldn't an experimental kitchen be installed there? Mightn't that be a good place in which, slowly, with deliberate procrastination and phase lag, in slow motion as it were, to initiate the Great Leap Forward?' "

"So then what?" asks my incapacitated Ilsebill. "Did the girls fall for that? Are aprons in demand again? Good God! Do they expect to emancipate themselves with cooking spoons?"

When the nunnish freedoms of the cooking abbess Margarete Rusch were under discussion and the Flounder (more or less playfully) suggested the establishment of feminist convents, first a loose, then a more structured group began to form, drawing its first members from the various factions of the Revolutionary Advisory Council, but then enlisting certain of the associate judges. While the case of Agnes Kurbiella was being debated, the group, far from gaining in definition, stagnated, but when Amanda Woyke's farm kitchen was held out as an example, it crystallized into a faction which was widely decried as revisionist and which, first in the press, then among the public at large, became known as the "Flounder Party." Restaurant owner and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb passed for its spokesperson. Ulla Witzlaff and Helga Paasch were members. Ruth Si-moneit supported it with reservations. Ms. Schonherr, the presiding judge, was said to have expressed herself in private as a sympathizer. And even Bettina von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, tried to ingratiate herself with the Flounder Party.

This development, which split most of the groups, espe-

daily the liberals and Spontaneous Revolutionaries, led to constant conflict with the explicitly ideological groups, and all the more so as heresy had raised its head even among the Marxists. Group discipline became more severe. Anyone who had signed up for the working groups of the so-called Flounder Party was expelled or rejected. And yet those feminists who had unjustly been classified as "moderates" gained more and more influence, for the Flounder Party was very hard on the Flounder, and Therese Osslieb gave him a really rough time. Just as Amanda Woyke had berated Inspector August Romeike as a dope or a bully, so Osslieb flung such titles as "flathead" and "super-Hegel" at the Flounder.

She took a critical view of the Flounder but opposed a blanket condemnation. The prosecution, she said, would have to acknowledge that his enlightened bourgeois approach had been relatively progressive at the time. The Tribunal, after all, had him-and his protege Rumford-to thank for illuminating material concerning the pioneering function of the farm kitchen. The present world food situation-more than half of mankind being undernourished-called for the radical elimination of the family kitchen and 1 reconsideration of historical forms of the large-scale kitchen. This thesis of the Flounder's, Osslieb went on, defied argument and should definitely be taken into the program of the feminist movement. While justly deploring his male arrogance, the Tribunal should be grateful to him for his fruitful ideas. As associate judge, she, Therese Osslieb, would put the egalitarian, or as the Flounder called it, the Chinese world food solution into practice. This she would do on her own premises. Let the men jabber about the Great Leap Forward if that amused them; the women, at long last, would actually make it.

Now Therese Osslieb's restaurant in Kreuzberg was rather a fancy sort of place, where eccentrics hung out and the cuisine was explicitly Czech; Therese's maternal grandmother seems to have been a Viennese of Czech descent. The owner, however, soon managed to drive away most of the geniuses to gain an empathetic understanding of Amanda Woyke's farm kitchen and to popularize, along with West Prussian potato soup, other simple dishes: manna grits boiled

with bits of bacon rind; sorrel cooked like spinach; millet cooked in milk; potatoes in their jackets with curds and caraway seed; oatmeal sausage on mashed potatoes; naturally, potato dumplings, Bavarian as well as Bohemian; and fried potatoes accompanied by one thing and another: herring, fried eggs, meatballs, jellied pork.

Up until then the restaurant had borne an esoteric name; now, as the meeting place of the feminists, it became "Ilsebill's Barn." The imperial Austrian decor disappeared; now freshly whitewashed walls were graced with just a few rustic ornaments. Few of the old patrons stayed on. But soon the prices started going up again, for each evening Therese Osslieb's husband, who was quick to adapt, put on a program for the entertainment as well as the enlightenment of the public: "Sir Walter Raleigh and the Potato." "The Potato in Shakespeare." "The Introduction of the Potato as Precondition for the Industrialization and Proletarianization of Central Europe." And, breathtaking in its timelessness, "Potato Prices Yesterday and Today."

Associate Judge Helga Paasch of the Women's Tribunal, owner of a nursery garden at Britz, promised to grow organic potatoes for Ilsebill's Barn on a half-acre plot which, moreover, would be open to educational visits. The children of committed women were invited to take part in a painting competition, and soon the restaurant was decorated with potato motifs. Songs in praise of the potato were written, set to music, and sung. A back room was set aside for the production of potato prints. Diners who wished to could sit in a circle, chatting and peeling potatoes for themselves and others. The name Amanda was conferred for life on several female babies who had been born while the case of Amanda Woyke was under discussion and whose mothers (and fathers) were among the steady customers of Ilsebill's Barn.